This case series focuses on a fictitious company, Fairview Inc., a software-as-a-service company, that utilizes a travel expense reimbursement process for its sales and information technology employees who travel to customer locations. The Audit Committee would like to change its audit approach of these expenses from sampling and manual data collection to utilizing audit analytics procedures on 100% of all data newly collected through automation. The CFO is considering alternatives for the current reimbursement calculation method and employee assignment method for customer calls to better to optimize resources. Students are asked to complete the analyses and share findings and recommendations. The case series includes four cases that can be completed independently:
Case 2: Travel expense audit — Currently, Fairview Inc. reimburses its sales and IT employees for travel expenses to visit customers using a variable-rate method based upon mileage between the home of the employee and the customer location using Internal Revenue Service standard mileage rates. In the past, Fairview Inc.'s Internal Audit Department would select a sample of these employee travel expenses and use a manual process to collect the mileage data from an external source to validate the expenses. However, in the current year, the Internal Audit Department created a bot to automate the collection of this data for 100% of the employee trips. Note that there is an EYARC Innovation mindset RPA case, Travel expense audit, where students can create the bot to generate the data for this audit. Students are asked to analyze this data to complete the audit. The case solution is provided in Tableau, including how-to videos.
Suitable courses: Cost or managerial accounting; Accounting information systems; Auditing; Data analytics